I remember some months ago reading about this wacko, weirdo guy who just "dove into things", a culture of immersion for a month or so to see what particular lifestyle phenomena were all about. He works for Esquire Magazine. I'd forgotten about him until Tim Keel turned me on to the TED web site.
While there, I just ran across a relatively short video where A. J. Jacobs talks about trying, for an entire year, to live as much as he could understand to do so literally by the proscriptions of the Bible. It is a fascinating talk. He went from being a Jewish agnostic to a reverent Jewish agnostic. He discovered that he had not come anywhere close to giving thanks for the many, many good things that go on everyday because he had been so focused on the 3-4 bad things that went wrong.
He also grew to understand the gift of resting on the Sabbath. That is a concept that is so very little understood in our culture in the 21st century. Although it is a topic for another post, rest does not equal sleep or napping. When God rested on the 7th day, he was not tuning out.
At any rate, it’s a very interesting reflection on the part of A. J. Jacobs.